Various embodiment of the invention relate generally to solid state disks (SSDs) and particularly to smart SSDs.
Solid State Disks (SSDs) have shown promise in cloud storage and other types of large storage applications. An entire standard, used by SSDs, i.e. PCI Express (PCIe), has been developed.
Currently, SSDs are nearly dumb storage devices with no capability of complex data manipulation, which is essentially done by external processors or microcontrollers. The act of retrieving and/or storing data in the SSDs causes a wait time before computation can be started. As can be appreciated, system performance is an essential advantage in large-scale storage applications servicing many users.
For example, current server architectures perform computation of data that is stored in a storage medium. Performing this computation entails moving data to and from main memory of the processor, such as a central processing unit (CPU), and the storage subsystem. Moving the data hinders system performance.
Therefore, the need arises to remove the above bottleneck for high-performance applications using SSDs.